Loop error counter on full screen sheet music

Synthesia is a living project. You can help by sharing your ideas.
Search the forum before posting your idea. :D

No explicit, hateful, or hurtful language. Nothing illegal.
Post Reply
Jano
Posts: 7

Post by Jano »

Hello,

When working on a specific section of a song, I think this window showing the number of errors for each iteration is a really great tool :

Image

Unfortunately this is not shown when in full-screen sheet music mode. Do you think it would be possible to add it in a future update ?

Thanks a lot for the great software you created. I went through a lot of this forum's post and I really like the way you communicate with your users, I wish more business would have that kind of "no bullshit" communication and transparency.

Take care.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

This has been a tricky one. The falling notes only become "important" closer to the keyboard, where that statistics overlay window doesn't usually get in the way). Even if it does, the falling notes eventually move someplace else where you can see them again.

It's been a lot more challenging to find an open space for those stats in the sheet area. The sheet music doesn't move, so if the box is in the way, it stays in the way forever until the "page" flips and something else is covered forever.

So far I've been thinking of inserting a little status bar between the timeline and the top of the sheet music display. Instead of being an overlay, it would consume the space completely so nothing could be covered. This is also challenging because on smaller tablets (and especially phone-sized Android devices) there is very little room to begin with, so taking more away from the sheet display feels like a bad idea.

This is the first time I recall anyone asking about it, so now is as good a time as any: does anyone have any other suggestions? I suppose I could try to make that window much narrower (maybe just leave the numbers but drop the text?) and fit it into the margin of the sheet area so it doesn't cover anything up...
Jano
Posts: 7

Post by Jano »

I think a horizontal status bar is not a great idea because the point of this window is to show each iteration of a loop as a line and you couldn't do that on an horizontal display.
I think something like that might be good :

Image

But it should have a little slider to adjust the size or hide it completely (and maybe be off by default on small screens ?)
And to make it narrower you could remove the timer in the middle I don't think it is an important information to show (in my opinion at least, I never found it useful).

Thanks a lot
User avatar
jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

As a slight digression, is the keyboard display really needed in full screen sheet music mode? I am sure some would argue that it is a better way to confirm what keys you are playing than looking at the keyboard. But I would argue that the time it takes to look at the keyboard display and confirm that the correct notes are being played from a sheet music display is far too long for anyone who needs the confirmation. If a played note confirmation is needed for full screen sheet music mode, I think it should be in the form of some type of played note notation on top of the sheet music notation.

Getting rid of the keyboard display would free a lot of screen space for the loop error counter. Would a graph be a more useful and compact display? Or a "ticker tape" display with one line of error counts scrolling off to the left?

As a further digression, is there still a one line sheet music display available with a falling notes display below? That would be the view I think those who want to transition from falling notes and played key confirmation to reading sheet music should be using. Longer term it might be nice to have the option of color coding the notes so that the relationship between the sheet music and the falling notes is easy to see.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

The keyboard can be hidden easily by dragging the blue block (that appears during pause) all the way down.

And the single-line sheet view is still available when both sheet music and falling notes are enabled simultaneously.
User avatar
jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Nicholas wrote: 03-13-20 10:13 pm The keyboard can be hidden easily by dragging the blue block (that appears during pause) all the way down.
"Can be hidden" is not the same as "not available" when it comes to allocating scarce screen real estate.

Another thought is does the loop error count need to be displayed while you are playing the loop? Can it just be displayed between loops? One could argue that you should never be focused on the mistakes you've made while playing, only what you are going to play. The distraction of a changing error counter can induce more errors.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Jano
Posts: 7

Post by Jano »

jimhenry wrote: 03-13-20 3:55 pm As a slight digression, is the keyboard display really needed in full screen sheet music mode? I am sure some would argue that it is a better way to confirm what keys you are playing than looking at the keyboard. But I would argue that the time it takes to look at the keyboard display and confirm that the correct notes are being played from a sheet music display is far too long for anyone who needs the confirmation. If a played note confirmation is needed for full screen sheet music mode, I think it should be in the form of some type of played note notation on top of the sheet music notation.

Getting rid of the keyboard display would free a lot of screen space for the loop error counter. Would a graph be a more useful and compact display? Or a "ticker tape" display with one line of error counts scrolling off to the left?

As a further digression, is there still a one line sheet music display available with a falling notes display below? That would be the view I think those who want to transition from falling notes and played key confirmation to reading sheet music should be using. Longer term it might be nice to have the option of color coding the notes so that the relationship between the sheet music and the falling notes is easy to see.
I agree that a graph of number of mistakes over each iteration is a better idea. But what should be the y-axis scale ? If you usually make around 5 mistakes and just once you make 50 mistakes the scale would get too big and the graph would be useless.

About that blue block to resize the piano, I think it is not obvious enough, I found out about it randomly by reading this forum. Maybe it should always be displayed and not only on pause ?
User avatar
jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Jano wrote: 03-14-20 5:50 am I agree that a graph of number of mistakes over each iteration is a better idea. But what should be the y-axis scale ? If you usually make around 5 mistakes and just once you make 50 mistakes the scale would get too big and the graph would be useless.
What about a semilog graph where the y-axis is powers of 2? 5 mistakes would fall between the second (4) and third (8) ticks. 50 mistakes would be between the fifth (32) and sixth (64) ticks.

Or how about an error graph where the x-axis is a time line of the loop that is the width of the error display and the y-axis is the number of mistakes at that point in time. (Or maybe it is binary, error or no error, regardless of how many wrong notes are involved.) Each loop would be plotted over the previous loop graphs that would fade out as they got older. Maybe an option for how many old loops are displayed? Maybe a way to study the graph if you pause between loops such as displaying the music on a single line next to the graph and allowing you to zoom in so you can see the passages where you are making mistakes? Allowing you to easily make smaller loops for the problem areas?
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

With enough samples, the right answer is a histogram (which neatly takes into account outliers). But I'm not sure anyone spends enough time in a single loop to collect that many samples.

For what it's worth "see which passages you're making mistakes" is the tag line for Synthesia 12. (You don't want to know how many lines are on the task list before that one is complete!) :lol:
User avatar
jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Nicholas wrote: 03-14-20 2:06 pm With enough samples, the right answer is a histogram (which neatly takes into account outliers). But I'm not sure anyone spends enough time in a single loop to collect that many samples.
My initial response was, "What if the histogram was for the whole song normalized for the number of time each measure was played?" But as I thought about it I realized the thing a histogram loses is the trend over time. I don't really care if I play a loop 10 times and I got a certain passage wrong 5 time if they were the first 5 times. I do care if I got something wrong 2 times and they were the last 2 (odd but it does happen sometimes).

Maybe a histogram with a range from 0 to 3 where the value is set to 3 when you make a mistake and decreases by 1 when you don't? When you make a mistake you have to play it correctly 3 times in a row to clear the mistake.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Post Reply